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Books Are People Too
I am inordinately happy about this librarian’s use of the pronoun ‘who’ in reference to books. Almost as happy as I am that the books will be saved.
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Ciao and Chow
Last year, I was lucky enough to become acquainted with a delightful professor of Italian. I helped Marie with revisions to Italian department curriculum, and she in turn gifted me friendship and food. The woman is a wizard in the kitchen. She cooks, bakes, and is the only person I know who makes gelato. Saying she makes gelato is hugely understating what she does. She has studied, invested, and practiced to the point that she’s a true gelato artist. Marie called my office one afternoon, “I have the gelato. I’ll bring it over just before five so you can get it home and in the freezer.” She breezed in with…
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Granola Bars and Humility
“The only metrics that will truly matter to my life are the individuals whom I have been able to help, one by one, to become better people.” – Clayton Christensen, How Will You Measure Your Life Years ago I had the privilege of attending an event in which Clayton Christensen was the featured speaker. I was aware of him being a thought leader in management, and had learned something about his principles from stories told about him. I have since come to respect him greatly and was saddened to learn of his death last month. While Christensen’s brilliance in innovation and business is laudable, one of the greatest lessons he…
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Creating a High Light World
On my ‘to read’ list is a book titled The Power of Bad: How the Negativity Effect Rules Us and How We Can Rule It by John Tierney and Roy F. Baumeister. I recently listened to a podcast in which Tierney stated that we currently live in a “high bad” world, where “merchants of bad” in the media work to make us think the world is worse than it really is. This checks out, right? A preponderance of media today focuses us on the depressing and depraved when what we deeply crave is the enlightening and excellent. I want to be a purveyor of light. By that I mean one…